Alexa Skills Kit

Give Your Vision a Voice and Reach More Customers

Why Build Alexa Skills?

Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices including the Echo family of devices, FireTV, Fire Tablet, and third-party devices with Alexa built-in. You can build voice experiences, or skills, that make everyday tasks faster, easier, and more delightful for customers.

Tens of thousands of developers have built skills using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples. With ASK, anyone can leverage Amazon’s knowledge in voice design to build quickly and easily. Start building today to reimagine your customer experience for voice and reach customers where they are.

What You Can Do

Serve Customers Naturally

You can use Amazon’s automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding technology to let people use their voices naturally to interact with your content, services, devices, and more. You can use the Alexa Presentation Language to combine voice with images, audio and video streaming, and touch control to deliver complete, intuitive, and engaging experiences across a wide range of device types.

Expand Your Reach

Customers use Alexa on tens of millions of dedicated devices in the home, like Echo Show and Fire TV, with the Alexa app on iOS and Android phones, and in cars with Alexa Auto. You can entertain, assist, and delight these customers by letting them use their voices to engage with you from different rooms in their homes, in their cars, and anywhere they go.

Make Money in Your Skills

You can make money directly in your Alexa skills. With in-skill purchasing, you can sell premium digital content to enrich your Alexa skill experience. You can offer subscriptions for sports, news, and music, consumables for game products like characters or levels, and entitlements for premium functionality. With Amazon Pay, you can sell real-world goods and services such as digital concert tickets, flowers, and gym memberships. You can also get paid for engaging skills that customers love most via Alexa Developer Rewards.

How You Can Build

Code It Yourself Using Our APIs

Build a rich and customized voice experiences that’s all your own using our self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples.

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban says developers, brands, and entrepreneurs should invest in building for voice in order to capitalize on Alexa’s reach. "Now’s the time to learn it. Now is the time to experiment with it. Now is the time to start using it,” Cuban says. “There's no future that doesn't have ambient computing or voice activation.”

Example Skill Types

Explore common skill types by choosing one of the examples below.

Game Skills

Kid Skills

Content Skills

Music Skills

Alexa Skills Kit Capabilities

An Alexa skill includes a voice user interface, or VUI, to understand customer intents, and a back-end cloud service to process intents and tell Alexa how to respond. You can use capabilities in the Alexa Skills Kit to deliver both.

You can use text-to-speech (TTS) and audio streams to respond to customer queries. You can add visual elements and touch inputs on Alexa-compatible devices with displays, and can add support for Echo Buttons.

You can write your back-end web service using any programming language and host it in either AWS Lambda or the HTTPS server of your choice. You can use ASK SDKs to get started quickly and take advantage of AWS promotional credits for Alexa.